Definition Simple moving average

A simple moving average is calculated for use in linear exponential smoothing (LES). Unlike the standard average (arithmetic mean), the moving average looks at a subset of the dataset and is calculated by adding the values in the subset and then dividing this result by the number of values in the subset. The number of values in each subset stays the same, but the actual values in the subset depend on where in the time series the simple moving average is being calculated.

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